The SME space is changing, and emerging leaders are utilising affordable, flexible and scalable big data and analytics tools. SMEs are confident about their ability to innovate, but much less certain about their ability to use big data and advanced analytics to do so...

For businesses large and small, relying on a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite such as Microsoft Office 365 is becoming the norm. Enhancing productivity in your organisation is vital to get ahead in 2017 - and using Office 365 can help, if it's used right...

With SSDs having come down in price into the range of ordinary people with ordinary budgets, it's been a boom time for companies, like Acronis, offering imaging and back-up software.

In the case of Acronis True Image, it's a bonanza that's well-deserved. It genuinely makes it easy to image a hard disk and to copy the contents from your creaking, old spinning-rust hard-disk drives onto your shiny, new, silent, fast SSD.

Of course, when conducting such an operation, it's wise to take it slowly and to be fully comfortable with what you're doing at every stage - you don't want to get the source disk and the destination disk mixed up, for example.

And, if you're imaging a laptop hard-disk drive, for example, you'll also need to connect it via a USB slot or two in order to conduct the operation. It will, therefore, take an hour or more to copy the contents of a 250GB hard-disk drive over.

But, that apart, Acronis True Image does pretty much everything for you, while also providing tinkerers, dare devils and the more knowledgable the kind of advanced options you need if, for example, you want to increase or decrease the size of partitions.

While there's plenty of alternatives to Acronis out there, including free and open source offerings, it is worth investing in Acronis's software to make sure the delicate operation is a straightforward success: there really isn't any other software out there for imaging a disk that is easier, more reliable or more highly rated than Acronis True Image.

Indeed, the only pause for thought you ought to give before wedging out for this software is whether a download key isn't provided with the SSD you've just purchased: companies like Crucial typically bundle in a copy of Acronis True Image, so check the box thoroughly, first, before clicking "Pay with credit card".